God The Ingenious Alchemist

"God's goodness is bigger than all human badness," writes best-selling author John Claypool. "God's power and willingness to forgive are greater than our human capacity to sin." The Bible is often held up as a source of family values, but it is also full of families who falter and do so generation after generation. Few families have visited as much evil on each other as Abraham's descendants in Genesis. Using these stories, Claypool explores how God turns the "lead" of evil–like Jacob's theft of Esau's birthright, and Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery in Egypt–into the "gold" of abundant blessing, as alchemists were said to do in the past. God is always more interested in our future, according to Claypool, than in our pasts. In this book, as in his other books, Claypool explores the biblical texts carefully, and with a pastoral eye for the characters from Genesis and his contemporary readers. This book offers challenge and comfort to people who feel that their sins may be beyond God's concern and their lives beyond redemption.

"God is an ingenious alchemist, with the capacity to take lead and make gold out of it. God can take evil and turn it into something that makes for growth and blessing. In the stories of Jacob - who stole his brother's birthright - and his family, and in the stories of contemporary people, Claypool shows us how God works through people even at their worst."-Page 4 of cover.

A exploration of how God works with us to bring about blessing.

By studying those whom Jesus selected as apostles and what he did for them, to them, with them, and through them, we can learn much about how we experience the holy in our own day. This book is about those apostles, their relationships with Jesus and with each other and what the dynamics of that community can teach us.

Robert Linders is an extraordinary preacher—one of the two best I have heard over a lifetime. He brings a wide variety of sources into play, traditional and contemporary, which illustrate the theme and reflect his broad knowledge and continuous reading. He requires hearers to reflect on theological, philosophical, scientific, cultural, and personal issues at a level of seriousness rarely found in modern preaching. —Peter C. Hodgson (PH.D. Yale) Charles G. Finney Professor of Theology Emeritus Divinity School, Vanderbilt University In the Land of Linders, Bible hermeneutics meet today’s news, and memorable jokes confront philosophical wisdom in such rapid succession that one needs at least a good week of conversation at home to sort them out. —Robert C. Williams (PH.D. Harvard) Pulitzer Prize nominee in Russian history Brunswick, Maine

What do Dexter King, Condoleeza Rice, Mackenzie King, Corazon Aquino, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bill Cosby, Tony Dungy, Theodore Roosevelt, George H. W. and Barbara Bush, Caroline Kennedy, Arthur Ashe, Lady Bird Johnson, Colin Powell and C. S. Lewis have in common? They all have significant grief experiences that have shaped their lives in dramatic ways, stories that have also shaped our lives. Grieving individuals, through "borrowing narratives," look for inspiration in biographic, historical and memoir accounts of political and religious leaders, celebrities, sports figures, and cultural icons. In a time of diminishing trust in heroes and "sainted leaders", who will speak to us from their grief? In a diverse society grief counselors and educators need to identify and "mine" the experienced grief(s) of historical personalities for resources for reflection and meaning-making. This book will help readers: find, "read," evaluate, extract, and adapt historical/biographical materials create bio-narrative resources for use in grief counseling and grief education explore the wide diversity of experienced grief in biographical narratives identify ways to "harness" grief narratives for personal reflection.

The universe is not the fruit of a series of random, chaotic, and blind events. Rather, nature is the manifestation of a work full of intelligent science and wisdom always faithful to and constant with itself. In the search for the original, authentic universe, only the great science of alchemy--founded on the principle that everything works as a whole, in close unity, and is all subdued to the same forces of equilibrium or disequilibrium in origin--has the power to expose the multiple faces of life and death. In Equilibrium, author Josué Roussel diligently explores the basis of the principle of universal equilibrium. This progressive study refines our perceptions in identifying the nature of balance and imbalance in the universe. Rather than being based on an intuitive inspiration, the science of alchemy exclusively provides an interpretation of the dual forces of good and evil--with truth emblazoned on one side and illusion on another. This science of the absolute establishes a close association between the physical world and the invisible world. Nothing is random since every single phenomenon we see and feel means something. Is there truth in spiritual revelation? And how can we make sense of all this? This innovative approach to both science and spirituality through alchemy will ultimately serve as the cornerstone of a series of works related to various themes associated with universal sciences. Building the philosopher’s stone becomes the ultimate lever of alchemy, and its breakthroughs will be demystified like never before!